Guillermo del Toro has signed on to direct The Hobbit and its sequel and will be moving to New Zealand for the next four years to work on the films, according to Variety.

We reported back in January that del Toro was in talks to direct the films for New Line and MGM, with Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh — the masterminds behind the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy — producing (see Guillermo del Toro to Direct “˜The Hobbit’). Soon after, news broke that the J.J.R. Tolkien estate had brought a lawsuit against New Line Cinema, stating that the studio had fail to pay part of the profits from its hugely succesfully Lord of the Rings film trilogy. The lawsuit threatened to put an end to the planned Hobbit project.

At the Hellboy II panel at NYCC, when asked the status of The Hobbit films, del Toro said that he’d know this week if the legal issues were resolved so that he could make the two live-action movies.

Now that del Toro’s officially signed on, he will work with Jackson and his Wingnut and Weta production teams in New Zealand — the setting for Middle Earth in the LOTR trilogy — while directing The Hobbit and its sequel back-to-back. The as-of-yet unnamed sequel will cover the 60-year period between The Hobbit and the first installment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring.

There’s no official start date for production at this time. There’s also no script or screenplay deal, though it’s expected that LOTR writers will collaborate with del Toro. The films originally were planned for 2010 and 2011 release dates, but now could come in late 2011 and 2012.